Four Past Midnight (30 page)

“No,” she said in a slightly unsteady voice, “but I guess it will have to do.”

He smiled a little, nodded, and gave her waist a brief squeeze. “Would you like to go to dinner with me when and if we make it back to L.A.?”

“Yes,” she said at once. “That would be something to look forward to.”

He nodded again. “For me, too. But unless we can get this airplane refuelled, we're not going anywhere.” He looked at the open cab of the hose cart. “Can you find neutral, do you think?”

Laurel eyed the stick-shift jutting up from the floor of the cab. “I'm afraid I only drive an automatic.”

“I'll do it.” Albert jumped into the cab, depressed the clutch, then peered at the diagram on the knob of the shift lever. Behind him, the 767's second engine whined into life and both engines began to throb harder as Brian powered up. The noise was very loud, but Laurel found she didn't mind it at all. It blotted out that other sound, at least temporarily. And she kept wanting to look at Nick. Had he actually invited her out to dinner? Already it seemed hard to believe.

Albert changed gears, then waggled the shift lever. “Got it,” he said, and jumped down. “Up you go, Laurel. Once we get it rolling, you'll have to hang a hard right and bring it around in a circle.”

“All right.”

She looked back nervously as the three men lined themselves up along the rear of the hose cart with Nick in the middle.

“Ready, you lot?” he asked.

Albert and Bob nodded.

“Right, then—all together.”

Bob had been braced to push as hard as he could, and damn the low back pain which had plagued him for the last ten years, but the hose cart rolled with absurd ease. Laurel hauled the stiff, balky steering wheel around with all her might. The yellow cart described a small circle on the gray tarmac and began to roll back toward the 767, which was trundling slowly into position on the righthand side of the parked Delta jet.

“The difference between the two aircraft is incredible,” Bob said.

“Yes,” Nick agreed. “You were right, Albert. We may have wandered away from the present, but in some strange way, that airplane is still a part of it.”

“So are
we
,” Albert said. “At least, so far.”

The 767's turbines died, leaving only the steady low rumble of the APUs—Brian was now running all four of them. They were not loud enough to cover the sound in the east. Before, that sound had had a kind of massive uniformity, but as it neared it was fragmenting; there seemed to be sounds within sounds, and the sum total began to seem horribly familiar.

Animals at feeding time,
Laurel thought, and shivered.
That's what it sounds like—the sound of feeding animals, sent through an amplifier and blown up to grotesque proportions.

She shivered violently and felt panic begin to nibble at her thoughts, an elemental force she could control no more than she could control whatever was making that sound.

“Maybe if we could see it, we could deal with it,” Bob said as they began to push the fuel cart again.

Albert glanced at him briefly and said, “I don't think so.”

Brian appeared in the forward door of the 767 and motioned Bethany and Rudy to roll the ladder over to him. When they did, he stepped onto the platform at the top and pointed to the overlapping wings. As they rolled him in that direction, he listened to the approaching noise and found himself remembering a movie he had seen on the late show a long time ago. In it, Charlton Heston had owned a big plantation in South America. The plantation had been attacked by a vast moving carpet of soldier ants, ants which ate everything in their path—trees, grass, buildings, cows, men. What had that movie been called? Brian couldn't remember. He only remembered that Charlton had kept trying increasingly desperate tricks to stop the ants, or at least delay them. Had he beaten them in the end? Brian couldn't remember, but a fragment of his dream suddenly recurred, disturbing in its lack of association to anything: an ominous red sign which read SHOOTING STARS ONLY.

“Hold it!” he shouted down to Rudy and Bethany.

They ceased pushing, and Brian carefully climbed down the ladder until his head was on a level with the underside of the Delta jet's wing. Both the 767 and 727 were equipped with single-point fuelling ports in the left wing. He was now looking at a small square hatch with the words FUEL TANK ACCESS and CHECK SHUT-OFF VALVE BEFORE REFUELLING stencilled across it. And some wit had pasted a round yellow happy-face sticker to the fuel hatch. It was the final surreal touch.

Albert, Bob, and Nick had pushed the hose cart into position below him and were now looking up, their faces dirty gray circles in the brightening gloom. Brian leaned over and shouted down to Nick.

“There are two hoses, one on each side of the cart! I want the short one!”

Nick pulled it free and handed it up. Holding both the ladder and the nozzle of the hose with one hand, Brian leaned under the wing and opened the refuelling hatch. Inside was a male connector with a steel prong poking out like a finger. Brian leaned further out ... and slipped. He grabbed the railing of the ladder.

“Hold on, mate,” Nick said, mounting the ladder. “Help is on the way.” He stopped three rungs below Brian and seized his belt. “Do me a favor, all right?”

“What's that?”

“Don't fart.”

“I'll try, but no promises.”

He leaned out again and looked down at the others. Rudy and Bethany had joined Bob and Albert below the wing. “Move away, unless you want a jet-fuel shower!” he called. “I can't control the Delta's shut-off valve, and it may leak!” As he waited for them to back away he thought,
Of course, it may not. For all I know, the tanks on this thing are as dry as a goddam bone.

He leaned out again, using both hands now that Nick had him firmly anchored, and slammed the nozzle into the fuel port. There was a brief, spattering shower of jet-fuel—a very welcome shower, under the circumstances—and then a hard metallic click. Brian twisted the nozzle a quarter-turn to the right, locking it in place, and listened with satisfaction as jet-fuel ran down the hose to the cart, where a closed valve would dam its flow.

“Okay,” he sighed, pulling himself back to the ladder. “So far, so good.”

“What now, mate? How do we make that cart run? Do we jump-start it from the plane, or what?”

“I doubt if we could do that even if someone had remembered to bring the jumper cables,” Brian said. “Luckily, it doesn't
have
to run. Essentially, the cart is just a gadget to filter and transfer fuel. I'm going to use the auxiliary power units on our plane to suck the fuel out of the 727 the way you'd use a straw to suck lemonade out of a glass.”

“How long is it going to take?”

“Under optimum conditions—which would mean pumping with ground power—we could load 2,000 pounds of fuel a minute. Doing it like this makes it harder to figure. I've never had to use the APUs to pump fuel before. At least an hour. Maybe two.”

Nick gazed anxiously eastward for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice was low. “Do me a favor, mate—don't tell the others that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don't think we
have
two hours. We may not even have one.”

Alone in first class, Dinah Catherine Bellman opened her eyes.

And
saw.

“Craig,” she whispered.

But he didn't want to hear his name again. When people called his name, something bad always happened.
Always.

No. He
wouldn't
get up. His head had become a vast chambered hive; pain roared and raved in each irregular room and crooked corridor. Bees had come. The bees had thought he was dead. They had invaded his head and turned his skull into a honeycomb. And now ... now ...

They sense my thoughts and are trying to sting them to death,
he thought, and uttered a thick, agonized groan. His bloodstreaked hands opened and closed slowly on the industrial carpet which covered the lower-lobby floor. Let me die,
oh please just let me die.

It was his father's voice, the one voice he had never been able to refuse or shut out. But he would refuse it now. He would shut it out now.

“Go away,” he croaked. “I hate you. Go away.”

Pain blared through his head in a golden shriek of trumpets. Clouds of bees, furious and stinging, flew from the bells as they blew.

Oh let me die,
he thought.
Oh let me die. This is hell. I am in a hell of bees and big-band horns.

“No,” he said. “No more hitting.” His hands shuffled on the carpet. He made an effort to open his eyes, but a glue of drying blood had stuck them shut. “You're dead. Both of you are dead. You can't hit me, and you can't make me do things. Both of you are dead, and I want to be dead, too.”

But he wasn't dead. Somewhere beyond these phantom voices he could hear the whine of jet engines ... and that other sound. The sound of the langoliers on the march. On the
run.

He realized that it wasn't the voice of his father, or of his mother, either. That had only been his poor, wounded mind trying to fool itself. This was a voice from ... from

some other place, some high bright place where pain was a myth and pressure was a dream.

“Man enough?” he croaked. “
Man
enough? Whoever you are, you've
got
to be shitting me.”

He tried again to open his eyes. The tacky blood holding them shut gave a little but would not let go. He managed to work one hand up to his face. It brushed the remains of his nose and he gave voice to a low, tired scream of pain. Inside his head the trumpets blared and the bees swarmed. He waited until the worst of the pain had subsided, then poked out two fingers and used them to pull his own eyelids up.

That corona of light was still there. It made a vaguely evocative shape in the gloom.

Slowly, a little at a time, Craig raised his head.

And saw
her.

She
stood within the corona of light.

It was the little girl, but her dark glasses were gone and she was looking at him, and her eyes were kind.

She was not standing on the floor, he saw. Her shoes appeared to float an inch or two above it, and the bright light was all around her. She was outlined in spectral radiance.

He started struggling to his feet. It was very hard. His sense of balance was almost gone, and it was hard to hold his head up—because, of course, it was full of angry honeybees. Twice he fell back, but each time he began again, mesmerized and entranced by the glowing girl with her kind eyes and her promise of ultimate release.

Dinah lay on the stretcher, watching with her blind eyes as Craig Toomy got to one knee, fell over on his side, then began trying to rise once more. Her heart was suffused with a terrible stern pity for this hurt and broken man, this murdering fish that only wanted to explode. On his ruined, bloody face she saw a terrible mixture of emotions: fear, hope, and a kind of merciless determination.

I'm sorry, Mr. Toomy
, she thought.
In spite of what you did, I'm sorry. But we need you.

Then called to him again, called with her own dying consciousness:

And she sensed that it was.

Once the longer of the two hoses was looped under the belly of the 767 and attached to its fuel port, Brian returned to the cockpit, cycled up the APUs, and went to work sucking the 727-400's fuel tanks dry. As he watched the LED readout on his right tank slowly climb toward 24,000 pounds, he waited tensely for the APUs to start chugging and lugging, trying to eat fuel which would not burn.

The right tank had reached the 8,000-pound mark when he heard the note of the small jet engines at the rear of the plane change—they grew rough and labored.

“What's happening, mate?” Nick asked. He was sitting in the co-pilot's chair again. His hair was disarrayed, and there were wide streaks of grease and blood across his formerly natty button-down shirt.

“The APU engines are getting a taste of the 727's fuel and they don't like it,” Brian said. “I hope Albert's magic works, Nick, but I don't know.”

Just before the LED reached 9,000 pounds in the right tank, the first APU cut out. A red ENGINE SHUTDOWN light appeared on Brian's board. He flicked the APU off.

“What can you do about it?” Nick asked, getting up and coming to look over Brian's shoulder.